of the house, as he turned a spade of earth again and again in hopeless,
pusillanimous industry. But when his strained attention was presently
rewarded by a shouted summons to supper, and he stood erect but for the
slouching droop of shoulders that was more a matter of temperament than of
age, one saw a tall man of massive build, whose keen glance and slightly
grizzled hair belied his groping, ineffectual labor. The head, and face
were finely modelled. Unless nature had fashioned them in some vagrant,
prankish mood, such elegance of line betokened prior generations in which
gentlemen and scholars had played some part—the vagabond scion of a good
family, perhaps. A multitude of such had grafted on the pioneer stock of
the West, under names that carried no significance in the places whence
they came.

Weakness and self-indulgence there were, and those writ large and deep, on
the face of Warren Rodney; and, in default of an expression of deeper
significance, the wavering lines of instability produced a curiously
ambiguous effect of a fine head modelled by a ’prentice hand; a lady’s
copy of the Belvidere, attempted in the ardors of the first lessons, might
approximate it.

A smoking kerosene lamp revealed a supper-table of almost institutional
proportions. There were four sons and two daughters of the Tumlin union,
strapping lads and lasses all of them, with more than a common dower of
lusty health and a beauty that was something deeper than the perishable
iridescence of youth. There was Fremont, named for the explorer-soldier;
there was Orlando, named from his mother’s vague, idle musings over
paper-backed literature at certain "unchancy" seasons; there was Richards,
named from pure policy, for a local great man of whom Warren Rodney had
anticipated a helping hand at the time; there was Eudora, whose nominal
origin was uncertain, unless it bore affiliation to that of Orlando; there